We're no longer a fork of JHC. Maintaining a complete Haskell front-end was too much of a hassle, especially considering we're only interested in optimization on the GRIN level. For this reason, LHC has reinvented itself as an alternative backend to the Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
The lack of testability was a major problem in the previous version of LHC but hopefully we've learned from our mistakes. The new development efforts will be structured around a decremental reliance on a GRIN evaluator. In other words, we want to run the full testsuite between each and every significant code transformation. That no transformation should change the external behaviour of a GRIN program is a very simple invariant.
The current toolchain looks as following:
david@desktop:basic$ cat Args.hs
import System
main :: IO ()
main = do
as <- getArgs
mapM_ putStrLn as
david@desktop:basic$ ghc -fforce-recomp -O2 -fext-core -c Args.hs
david@desktop:basic$ lhc compile Args.hcr > Args.lhc
david@desktop:basic$ ./Args.lhc One Two Three
One
Two
Three
The contents of 'Args.lhc' is unoptimized GRIN code. It is not by any means efficient or fast but it serves its purpose.
Development will now focus on creating GRIN transformations that reduces the need for the RTS (our GRIN evaluator serves as the RTS).
